20 years of YouTube: In 2019, MatPat delivered a eulogy for the MCN era

In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.

In 2018, Matthew Patrick surpassed ten million subscribers on his Game Theorists YouTube channel, and his wife Stephanie gave birth to the couple’s first child. Despite achieving those personal milestones, the man known as MatPat described the penultimate year of the 2010s as “the hardest year of my life” — and Defy Media was one of the biggest reasons why.

That description comes from a video MatPat posted in January 2019. Two months earlier, Defy had abruptly closed its doors, leaving dozens of employees and creators in the lurch. Defy had been one of the leading multi-channel networks (MCNs) on YouTube, but its deteriorating financial state ultimately led to its demise.

In the 2010s, MCNs like Defy, Maker Studios, Machinima, and Fullscreen built deep rosters by making tempting offers to some of YouTube’s biggest stars. The MCNs promised to supercharge creator revenue in exchange for a cut of the earnings. Since those companies also handled administrative tasks like rights management on behalf of their clients, many big-name creators took them up on their deals.

At the time of its collapse, Defy’s roster included notable YouTube-based IP like Smosh, Clevver Media, and The Warp Zone. Despite the star power affiliated with the network, it could not survive adverse “market conditions,” according to a statement that accompanied its shutdown.

MatPat saw the situation differently. To him and many others, Defy had bilked creators out of $1.7 million they were owed. By inserting itself as a middleman, it had harvested AdSense revenue in exchange for dubious claims to enhanced creator earnings. To MatPat, that enterprise bordered on criminal.

“You would have MCNs getting all this ad revenue money from checks that didn’t belong to them and then ultimately go around bragging about how much money they were earning,” MatPat said in his Defy autopsy video, “saying look at how rich and successful we are, don’t you want to invest money in us, become a part of our business, make it bigger, more successful, and then we all make tons of cash. [They were] hoping deep down inside to sell off before the bottom fell out of this whole Ponzi scheme. They were businesses founded with good intent, but ultimately built on nothing.”

The investments MatPat spoke of led MCNs like Maker, Fullscreen, and AwesomenessTV to come under new ownership. As the flawed business model of the MCN industry became apparent, those entities were mostly stripped for parts and left to fade into obscurity under their new parent companies.

When the MCNs fell apart, creators were sent scrambling. Some of Defy’s former clients were able to bounce back, but the entire community was left with sore feelings and a newfound jaded outlook. “These sorts of things change you. They make you more cynical,” MatPat said. “You go into every meeting with someone, every collaboration with someone, thinking ‘How is this person going to screw me over? How are they going to take advantage of me?'”

That take sums up the lasting legacy of the MCN downfall. The collapse of a company like Defy convinced many creators that they could not rely on middlemen if they wanted to turn their channels into full-fledged businesses. Six years later, we have blockbuster OnlyFans accounts, creator investors, and even bootstrapping teenage millionaires on Roblox. With increasing frequency, creators are making money for themselves rather than handing their earnings to third parties.

That pivot was much more difficult to pull off during the dawn of the MCNs, but by 2019, Logan Paul had already shown creators that they — not their partner networks, managers, sponsors, or anyone else — could be the ones in control of their destinies. Events like the Defy collapse hastened a shift that was already occurring.

Most people involved in the creator economy would argue that its current look is healthier for the community as a whole. Compared to five years ago, there are now more people making videos and more money generated from those videos. There are creators involved in politics and entrepreneurship. Heck, the term “creator economy” wasn’t even in common use when MatPat made his 2019 video. From a dollars-and-cents perspective, things are much better on YouTube now than they were when companies like Defy were skimming off the top.

And yet, as true as all those statements may be, the decline of the MCNs fundamentally changed creator culture, stripping away some of the key elements that had defined YouTube during the platform’s early years. Each MCN’s roster felt like a close-knit group of collaborators, and the networks instilled a sense of community, uniting creators through the shared goal of mutual growth. MCNs put the spotlight on the artistic side of the creator world, and that was a beautiful sight to behold — even if a cynic could argue that the emphasis was nothing more than lip service.

Ever since the MCNs faded into the background of YouTube, the platform has felt less like a single community and more like an interconnected tapestry of niches. That was arguably an inevitable transformation, since creator ranks continue to swell year after year, but I miss the creative energy once associated with MCNs.

In 2019, the creator business narrowed as its size ballooned. In our 2020 retrospective, we’ll say goodbye to another relic of YouTube’s past — and that one will be much more personal.